In 1951, Bishop traveled to South America for two weeks of inspiration, but after meeting and staying with Soares in her picturesque mountain-side home, two weeks became 15 years. Overall, it's an inviting subject: the hard work and ecstasy of meshed artistic lives mixed with cultural displacement, until personal demons (alcoholism, depression) and political changes arise and loyalties are tested. The performances are steady: Pires conveys a charismatic, energetic masculine eroticism, and when Otto can shed a discomfiting stiffness, she effortlessly channels a Susan Hayward-ish type of steeliness and vulnerability.

But everything ultimately gives way to the stately, simplistic, inevitable pace of by-the-numbers biopics, from some woefully tinny, hit-and-run screenwriting to the usual difficulties surrounding the dramatization of an author's craft. The writing of "One Art," Bishop's great poem about loss, is regrettably used as a bookending device, which just strips it of its heartbreaking complexity. Such choices do neither poetry nor movies a service.